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Wever, tailor-made mobility solutions for the greatest number of people

They come from Nice, and they might just revolutionize how you get around ! Wever will soon be celebrating its 3-year anniversary during the Viva Technology show they are attending on the ENGIE Lab.

They won the Euromed competition in 2016, which was how ENGIE spotted them. Thomas Côte, Wever’s founding CEO, gave us an introduction to his company and told us about a future where everyone can share in building their means of getting around.

The idea behind ​​Wever is simple, but revolutionary: if everybody could make their mobility needs known on a daily basis (whether for regular commuting from home to work or casual), we could build better transport networks that are adapted to their needs, rather than rely on existing transport networks.

Wever is the startup that allows people to express their mobility needs in order to build more efficient transportation networks in their community.

The solution designed by Wever covers all types of transport, from individual cars to bicycles, buses, electric scooters, car sharing and carpooling.

How do you implement these virtual networks in real life?

Wever collects information about people’s needs and, using algorithms, models transport solution that are then approved by the users. As soon as there are enough of them, we work with transport operators (such as Transdev, who we partner with) to set these solutions up "physically".

We are also involved at the community level, and our economic model is to finance the creation of these transport networks through hybrid public/private models. Wever’s first goal is to increase performance for existing networks. The second is to create new transport networks that are financed through these hybrid models, whether all or in part by the user, or all or in part by our customers: communities, businesses, shopping centers, universities, football clubs or event organizers, who generate the traffic.

The innovative aspect of our solution is that it reverses the existing transportation planning process. In general, users have to fit in the mold of transport networks and choose their place of residence, place of work, and their leisure based on existing transport options. We propose the opposite. Users choose where they want to live, work, what they want to do and then, in the community, they share in building the transport solution that suits them.

In doing so we are completely reversing the model of how transport networks are constructed, which focuses on aggregate flows and not necessarily individual needs. We are also reversing the economic model, since we are moving from one based on state subsidies to optimizing revenue sources.

How do you go about collecting information about people’s needs?

We do crowdsourcing by cross referencing user demands with cold data from operators, communities, and companies, which we then aggregate to create an enriched and complex data set. We analyze this dataset to model the transport supply.

It is important to specify that we are totally RGPD compatible. We do not geotrack, and we explain to people how and why we will use the data they entrust to us.

Are your customers the end users?

Our paying customers are the stakeholders involved in mobility issues: companies, campuses, events. These travel aggregators suffer from collective mobility issues and need to analyze them in order to be able to equip themselves to handle it, to carry out their transportation plans or make them run in in a more pragmatic way.

The end user will use the solutions we offer. In some cases it will be free, if we tell them they can rent a bike or use a car pool. The first application for Wever involves setting up short-term bus lines, which is very impressive. But in reality, transforming mobility already involves telling you that at the corner of your street there are electric bikes for rent and that you are within 10 minutes of your work by electric bike.

Accessing the application and identifying available solutions is free. And the application also allows you to listen to people and tell them how many other people have the same need on the scale of a neighborhood or a company.

Have you already started to install solutions in France?

Today we are working in Brest, Ile de France, the Hauts de France region, Marseille, Nice and elsewhere... We’ve set up carpooling networks, corporate electric bike networks, customized shuttles for sports associations, connected parking solutions… a wide range of solutions.

What will you be showing at the booth at Vivatech?

We want to make our promise tangible. And for that, we will give visitors an opportunity to live it in real life, by informing on the platform their transport needs for the day.

Every day of the event we will set up a tailor-made Wever shuttle to cover most people’s needs. So some of the visitors will be able to experience Wever in reality. Depending on the time slot and the most popular destination, the shuttle will wait outside to take them where they need to go.

What do you expect to get from participating in Vivatech with ENGIE?

We are expecting to fully roll out a Wever solution that covers a maximum number of prospects and see how our solution can provide answers to their problems.

We are in the process of taking off. We are planning a fundraising round, and we would like to announce it at Vivatech. We operate openly and want to get all of the relevant mobility stakeholders involved to help them discover what we do.

We are rolling out our solution everywhere in France, and by the end of 2018 we expect to confirm our first 50 customers; several thousand people are already registered on the platform. For us the next step is to exceed 100 customers.

A slogan ?

For the CES last January we used: "the first tailormade massive mobility manager", that is to say "The first solution capable of providing millions of people with hyper-personalized mobility solutions. "

And for you the future will be...?

The future will be international!

The problem we are addressing is universal, but for us the future will be in an international rollout with French principles, meaning respecting privacy and data processing, with quality solutions and real expertise.